The bulge that appeared this week was almost certainly made a fortnight ago. People find that hard to believe, and it is the single most useful thing to understand about impact damage. When a wheel drops hard into a pothole, the tyre is momentarily squashed flat between the road and the rim, and a handful of casing cords snap under that load. Nothing changes at the time. There is a bang, the steering wheel jolts, the car drives on normally and the moment gets forgotten.
What happens next is slow. Air presses on the small area where the cords have gone, the remaining rubber stretches, and over the following days or weeks a swelling grows out of the sidewall until somebody notices it washing the car. By then the tyre has been carrying a full load over Kingston Bridge and back for a fortnight without anybody knowing. This is why a bulge is worth looking at urgently rather than eventually. It is not a warning about damage to come. It is the visible end of damage that finished happening a while ago, and there is nothing to be done for it except a new tyre.
Run your hand round the inside of the sidewall, slowly, with the car on the ground. What there is, is a replacement brought to you: correct size, fitted and balanced where the car stands in KT1, with the alloy and the sensor checked while the wheel is off. Old tyres leave Hampton Wick, Coombe and KT1 with us, every time. You watch it happen in Kingston Hill, or at the kerb in Kingston town centre. KT1 takes in Norbiton and Canbury, and we work the lot.
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The ground rises towards Kingston Hill and Coombe and the town centre one ways are stop and start, which puts a lot of low speed weight transfer through tyres that are already working hard. Potholes on the approaches do the actual damage. Because the evidence arrives late, the useful habit after a heavy jolt is a proper look at both sidewalls rather than a glance at the tread.
The cords fail instantly. The bulge is made of rubber creeping outwards afterwards, and that takes time and mileage. The gap between cause and symptom is why so many drivers are certain they have never hit anything, and why the honest answer at the kerb is that the pothole is long behind you.
Impact damage belongs to whichever wheel found the hole. Unless the other tyre on that axle is worn down or a different pattern, there is no reason to touch it. Cars behave better on matched rubber, so both get looked at and you get told whether matching genuinely matters here.
A hard enough impact bends the wheel as well as breaking cords, and a buckled rim weeps air slowly around the bead however good the new tyre is. With the wheel off it gets spun and the bead seat checked, because fitting fresh rubber to a bent rim only postpones the same complaint.
Please do not drive it at all if there is any choice. A bulge is a burst waiting for heat and load, and the queues on the approach to Kingston Bridge supply both. Leave the car where it is standing and the work comes to the kerb.
It cannot. There is no mechanism by which broken cords reknit, and adding or releasing air changes nothing whatever about the structure. The one thing that does change is the size of the swelling, which tends to grow as the tyre keeps working.
Sadly it counts for nothing here. Tread depth is about clearing water on a wet road. The casing is what holds the car up, and a tyre with plenty of tread and a broken casing is scrap in exactly the same way a bald one is.
Any competent fitter will, because no repair for sidewall damage exists anywhere in the standards. If somebody offers to patch it, walk away from them. We would sooner lose the job than put a patch behind a broken wall.
It is, and it takes a few minutes online. Councils keep records of reported defects on roads like the A307 Richmond Road, and drivers do sometimes claim successfully for a tyre. We will tell you plainly what we found so you have something to quote.
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